The diagnosis of art: Millais' Blind Girl

It is an

Figure 1

The Blind Girl (1854–1856) by John Everett Millais, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK (oil on canvas 83 × 62 cm). In colour online

entertaining game to spot what might be medical conditions depicted in art, and then try to identify them. Usually we cannot be sure that we are right, or indeed sometimes that there is even a diagnosis to be made. But occasionally the artist tells us the diagnosis. Such is the case in ‘The Blind Girl’ (1854–1856; Figure 1) by Sir John Millais. How can an artist depict blindness in a painting when the eyes do not appear abnormal? He can of course tell us, in the title of the painting or by other written evidence, both of which apply in this case. But the poignancy of blindness will be lost if the artist does not deal with the topic in other ways.

Millais solved the problem by emphasizing the other senses. He shows a beggar girl, her eyes closed, sitting in a meadow after a storm, her poverty identified by her tattered clothes and her blindness by the label around her neck (‘pity the blind’). All her senses, besides that of sight, are heightened. She can feel the comforting touch of the hand of her companion, perhaps her sister, in her left hand and her body leaning against her. She explores the contours of a white meadow flower in her right hand and may also be going to bruise the flower in order to enhance its smell, which she strives to detect by tilting her head, no doubt taking in all the other country smells around her. Her tilted face also allows her to appreciate the heat of the sun on her face, although she cannot see the shadows that it creates. Mooing cows and cawing crows invade her hearing.

We can tell that the girl is concentrating hard on detecting these stimuli, because she sits so stock still that a tortoiseshell butterfly has alighted on her cloak, taking her, perhaps, for a flower.

The poignancy of the girl's condition is enhanced by the appearance behind her in the sky of a rare double rainbow, which she cannot see. The rainbow is a reminder of, among other things, God's covenant with Noah after the flood (Genesis 9:8–17), of which John Milton, already blind, wrote in Paradise Lost (XI: 884–97)

So willingly doth God remit his ire … That he relents, not to blot out mankind, And makes a covenant never to destroy The earth again by flood, nor let the sea Surpass his bounds, nor rain to drown the world With man therein or beast; but when he brings Over the earth a cloud, will therein set His triple coloured bow, whereon to look And call to mind his cov'nant.

The two girls cannot hope to find the legendary pot of gold at the rainbow's end, apparently situated in the town of Winchelsea, seen in the background. But they may be on their way there, to try to earn a penny from entertaining the townsfolk with the accordion that rests in the blind girl's lap. The double rainbow may also be a sign of redemption, like the ones that Robert Browning mentioned in his verse drama ‘Pippa Passes’ (1841) and described in his twin poems ‘Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day’:

The black cloud-barricade was riven, Ruined beneath her feet, and driven Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless, North and South and East lay ready For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, Sprang across them and stood steady. 'T was a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect, From heaven to heaven extending, perfect As the mother-moon's self, full in face. It rose, distinctly at the base With its seven proper colours chorded, Which still, in the rising, were compressed, Until at last they coalesced, And supreme the spectral creature lorded In a triumph of whitest white, – Above which intervened the night. But above night too, like only the next, The second of a wondrous sequence, Reaching in rare and rarer frequence, Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, Another rainbow rose, a mightier, Fainter, flushier and flightier, – Rapture dying along its verge. Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge, Whose, from the straining topmost dark, On to the keystone of that arc?

‘Christmas-Eve’, which describes a visionary religious experience, was published in 1850, just a few years before Millais produced his painting of the blind girl. Could Browning's double rainbow have influenced him?